Year 8 Paired Reading Project

Over the past ten days I have been busy revamping our Year 8 English Wide Reading Project called "Reading in Pairs". In the past, paired up students have worked together on a number of tasks and presented their reponses to their chosen novel as a powerpoint presentation. Although this was a popular project it was nevertheless time to move on and introduce some web2.0 tools and have students  create and present to a wider audience. In Term 4 they will create their own blogs and write regular blog entries from the perspective of a main character.There are a variety of multimedia tasks such as:

• inserting images
• creating a character avatar.
• selecting and inserting music
• filming and publishing a one minute movie

Each Year 8 English class has its own blog and student blogs will be linked to it.They will all be a "work in progress". All tasks and assessment criteria are on the class blog and each week a new post will help scaffold students through their tasks.This new project is certainly exciting for us. It will hopefully be engaging and will give our students opportunities to learn new skills. Unfortunately I am away on Long Service Leave in Term 4 and so won't be able to witness the steep learning path for both students and teachers. It should be fun but no doubt fraught with some difficulties along the way. I will be very keen to hear how it all goes and ISC staff will post a blog about it all in Week 7.

The Social Media Revolution

Recent world events have certainly highlighted the power of social media.The video clip below brings home to me how important it is for us as teachers to be educating our students on how to use social media effectively and responsibly.

Congratulations Cath Crowley

It's been a great year for our 2010 Lorna Sparrow Artist in Residence.Last year Cath ran workshops with our Year 7's and 8's and spoke to our Year 9's about what influenced her in her writing of Graffiti Moon.This novel has won for her the

• 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adults
• 2011 NSW's Premier's Literary Award for Young Adults
• 2011 CBCA Honour Award
• 2011 Victoria's Premier Award for Young Adults - Shortlisted

Cath must be literally over the moon herself.Not only does she write well but she is a lovely warm person who deserves these accolades.

Visual Literacy

Increasingly,statistical data is being presented in creative and attractive infographics.Here is an excellent site that highlights the importance of becoming visually literate in the 21st century.It contains great links to infographics online that you can use in your classroom as well as links to resources to help students learn how to create infographics. Some of the resources mentioned are below.
Places to find beautiful and useful infographics:

Infographic a day for teachers- David Warlick presents useful infographics for teachers.

Information is Beautiful - David McCandless's site
Good Infographics – a collaborative site which focuses on providing good quality web resources – in this case, infographics

As a tool to teach visual and critical literacy:


Check out  the Slideshow on Visual Literacy and Nonlinguistic Representations Part 1.


Student's Using Infographics
 Ten Free Tools To Make Infographics
Glogster example

Evaluation for Students and Teachers

On Friday at our Staff Conference, Mike spoke about the importance of ongoing formative assessment and student reflection in the classroom for the primary purpose of improving student learning.
He also spoke about how our school's "Professional Learning Project" program is a powerful tool to help teachers reflect on their own teaching practices so that they can improve learning outcomes for their students.This new video from the Teaching Channel has been timely as it demonstrates how  teaching practices can be improved with coaching and reflection and is well worth viewing.
To view click on Time Mangement in 7th Grade Science
I have also just come across AllThingsAssessment which is a website that has many interesting articles and links to other relevant websites about formative and summative  assessment in the classroom.

Students Love Technology

I have just found this great infographics on American college students usage of technology.I'm sure we would have similar patterns here.Students do expert to use digital tools as part of their everyday lives and it is up to us as educators to determine which tools are best for learning


Via: OnlineEducation.net

Prezis at Gippsland Grammar

Are you sick of powerpoints? Are you looking for a new way of presenting class material? If you are, Prezis might be the answer for you. Prezi is a flash based application that lets you break away from the slide by slide approach of powerpoint.Instead, it allows you to create non linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map that contains words,links,images,PDF's and videos.It allows you to show the connection between concepts as you are able to focus on a piece of information,then zoom out to see the bigger picture.

It does take a while to get used to but once you get the hang of using the "bubble" menu you are on your way.

The Prezi website provides a number of short videos that explain how to use the application. This link  also has some great tips and hints for using Prezis in the classroom

Below are some examples created by the ISC staff for the Humanities Department and presented during the Staff Conference on August 12th.